ExPanDaR: Explore Panel Data Interactively

Overview

This is the documentation of the ExPanDaR (Explore Panel Data with R) package. ExPanDaR provides the code base for the ExPanD web app. ExPanD is a shiny based app supporting interactive exploratory data analysis.

ExPanD has two purposes:

Enable users to assess the robustness of empirical evidence without providing them with access to the underlying data.

Provide a toolbox for researchers to explore panel data on the fly.

While I hope that ExPanD will be particularly helpful in the academic review, publication and replication process I also think that it is convenient for typical exploratory data analysis workflows. In addition, it has already proven to be helpful in the classroom.

This is what ExPanD looks like:

If you are interested to see what ExPanD has to offer without diving into R, click here to explore an instance of ExPanD that hosts World Bank data or click here for a financial accounting and stock returns dataset of U.S. firms.

If you want to analyze your own panel data instead, you can also access a variant of ExPanD app here that allows user-side data uploads. No worries: Your data won’t be stored on the server and will get erased from memory as soon as you close the web connection.

Installation

If you are in for the full treat and want to test ExPanD from within R, run the following in your R session to install the ExPanDaR package from CRAN.